Yes, it may be hard, or it may be easy, to leave religion out of the workplace. Depending how religious you are, and how pervasive religious practices are in your culture. But it is in a totally different scale as leaving politics out of the workplace, or keeping politics out of the business.
As an example. If you make a strict separation of religion and the workplace, you just made a political decision. An employee who’s religion dictates they prey every morning, and you ask them to do so outside of the workplace, then you are doing politics.
The power dynamics involved in running a business and having workers means that you must make political decisions at some point. It is not like being an atheist because: a) a business is not a person, b) a religious decision usually does not affect people other then you self, and c) often being “apolitical” and not taking a stance, is simply taking a stance with the status quo. Not doing your morning prayer is not this nuanced.
Not that long ago religion WAS public policy (and depending where you live on the globe it still is; it's a spectrum).
We slowly segregated religion out of the business mattering for everyday life, but that just left a void what got filled by the same social and psychological mechanism that underpins religions.
While I believe it's incorrect to state that the current identity based political climate is just religion in disguise, it does share a hell lot of characteristics to dismiss the ties.
Saying "but this other thing is vaguely political" (or religious) is no excuse to insist that your company get involved in your pet causes.
Businesses take political and religious actions all the time.
Hobby Lobby refused to pay for any health insurance plan that covered contraception because they believed them to be abortifacients and contrary to the christian values of the corporation.
The difference today is that now it is employees rather than owners pushing for a certain stance.
This is rather an argument why not the employer, but the employee should pay for the health coverage. As they say in Germany:
"Wer zahlt, schafft an."
("who pays, commands", where the verb "anschaffen" (which I translate with "command" here) has the undertone of "giving sexual orders to a prostitute that she has to follow")
Nobody's claiming that work is completely unrelated to religion or politics. That's just the inverse of the stupid claim that because work sometimes involves those things, we might as well do them as much as we want.
Hobby Lobby filed the lawsuit that they are famous for. And they won the case? What an ignorant reply.
And we can’t really afford not to be involved in politics if that’s what it has devolved into. This isn’t about whether fiscal conservatism works or some foreign policy. We literally just elected people to the House who believe Trump is a savior combatting a Democratic ring of pedophiles who eat children. These people are showing up with assault rifles at places of business (see: Pizza Gate).
I think the most likely scenario here is that people who are pushing for their startups to take a stance are those who believe in science and human rights, and can’t stand to watch as the rest of the country buys into the madness. Because you can be sure that the people peddling this disinformation are absolutely fine with their businesses having a political stance.
See Koch brothers, Hobby Lobby, Chik Fil A, the police with their thin blue line flags and blue lives matter slogan.
If you want to ban talk about political discussion on economic policy from your business, fine, no one cares. But realistically thats not what this is about.
(I'm sure Alito thinks it means something else, but Alito is the only genuine nutbag on the court).
You can try to be clever by listing ways religion might relate to business, but that doesn't change the fact that businesses generally, and in many ways are legally required to, let people do their jobs regardless of their faith. It works just fine.
Everyone knows it's possible to make things more political. Being apolitical means doing the opposite. It's a very simple concept from kindergarten, "more" and "less".
Drawing some strained connection to politics doesn't magically make it impossible for us to say "try to have less politics at work".
If I followed you around all day complaining that you're not vegan enough, you'd suddenly regain the ability to notice that some things are more political and more related to your job than others.